Sonific SongSpot

December 11, 2006

Andy Skelton

I am pleased to introduce our latest sidebar widget and posting accessory, the Sonific SongSpot. It’s a beautiful music player backed by quality songs. There were over 47,000 of them the last time I counted. You can search the library, browse by genre or just randomly click around until you find the perfect atmosphere for your blog. Here’s an interesting one:

[sonific 6cfbf14342420c034e0ed2922758a3f9415e1732]

To post this, I went to the Sonific website and customized a new songspot. They provided a string of letters and numbers that I copied and pasted into this post, like so:

[sonific6cfbf14342420c034e0ed2922758a3f9415e1732]

You can use that little code in a post, page or text widget. (Don’t copy and paste from here though. There’s a trick hidden in there to keep it from being transformed into the SongSpot!)

There is also a handy SongSpot widget where you can simply paste the code and give the widget a title.

It’s time to make some noise.

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It’s now on my blog. I wish the player can be centered when you placed it at the sidebar. Although I can’t find the songs I want in the searcher, overall it’s a very handy and great addition. Thanks again.

Thanks everyone! We will be adding a TON of new tracks very soon, including the BareNaked Ladies and more… stay tuned, and keep me posted on what we can do to make this even better. Gerd Leonhard, CEO http://www.sonific.comhttp://www.sonificblog.com

What a surprise, and a very nice one at that! SongSpot is easy to set up (used the horizontal, x-tra small), looks quite nice in the sidebar, and I found some soothing, unobtrusive ambient background music. Named it “Reflections.” People can take a listen here:

Design is fine and elegant, but if you’re fond of minimalism, it can become a bit intrusive. Radioblog is far more difficult to make it work (on blogger, no idea how it could be inserted on wordpress.com)since you need php, but design is really really cool.

So lovely, so lovely. Anything dealing with music I love. I wonder, however, is there away to attach a single song to a particular post so that a different song can play with a different post? Just a thought…

A) The Music on Sonific
Sorry that many known artists and songs are not yet on Sonific – this is solely because we are still in the process of closing more deals with the record companies – we have 50+ already but need many more. Also, we will be adding a ton more songs in January and through-out 2007 – shooting for 1 Million songs by the end of the year-, and as soon as we can get the the licenses from the major record labels that, for now, own most of those tracks (and who always need more time to ‘get it’ than anyone else 🙂 we will have more hit songs and artists (such as the ones mentioned above) as well. Thanks for your support on this. If you really want a certain artist on here, you may want to try and email the record label to hurry up and provide us with the song!

Sonific actually licenses all music so that is a requirement before we can offer it (unlike some other tools that are out there ;); as a result our service is 100% legal and fully authorized by the rightsholders. But we are already heading towards 100.000 songs very soon so there should be something you like somewhere – try the featured artists first (each genre cloud has a list of them when you click on it). Thanks for your patience!

B) Radio functionality / Song Lists
We are currently discussing this feature and how we could offer it to our users… let us know if you really would like to make your own radio stations using our catalog!

C) Sonific Mail
We launched a new function 2 weeks ago: all of our songs can also be emailed to people, using the MAIL button in the search result page. Instead of hitting ‘use’ just hit the mail button and fire off a sonific greeting to someone. Give it a whirl (but note that there is a limit to the # of mails you can send).

D) As far as using the SongSpots goes, here is the best way to do this:
1) Register / sign-in to Sonific
2) Pick a song you like (use the ‘find songspots’ engine – click on any genre to get a list of recommended tracks)
3)Click on ‘use’
4) Name your songspot (anything goes here), pick ‘wordpress’ from the list, give us the precise URL of your blog (required), click on ‘activate’. On the SongSpot edit menu be sure to pick the VERTICAL PLAYER not the horizontal one, because this will make it fit nicely into most sidebars. Only pick ‘auto-play ON’ if you are 100% sure your site visitors will like that the music starts automatically. And if you do, be sure to place the SongSpot on TOP of the sidebar so people can find it and use the controls right away.
5) On the next page, if you are using wordpress.com, copy the Song UUiD (the link with the #s, on the bottom of the page)
6) Go to your wordpress account page, sign in, and go to ‘presentation’, click on ‘sidebar widgets’, drag Sonific to your widget list, click on the widget tool (after you have dragged it!), this opens the small input window, and add the code where it says UUiD — this will create the SongSpot exactly like you have set it at Sonific.com
*Done*

This widget makes perfect sense if you’re running a music blog. I’m not sure I’ll be using it though, as the selection is questionable, even with a supposed 47,000+ tracks. Sonific will never catch on unless they can cut a deal with some of the major record companies, and from the looks of it, that hasn’t happened yet.

This is really great, I’m going to have to try this out. Thanks WordPress folks… first you give me free space, then you give us music, new themes, and cool hats. No wonder I tell everyone to come here.

Thanks for providing the great widget. I’m impressed with WordPress.com 🙂

However is it possible to make it such that one is able to customize one’s own songs instead of the limited number/type/genre of songs available. For instance, I searched for a few anime songs but it wasn’t available.

Rado
weare thinking about offering the multi-song feature; it is requested fairly often now. Right now you can just paste several songspots in a row (just add more Sonific widgets at WordPress, and then pick a song for each) — just don’t select auto-play if you do…

Gerd Leonhard, these are great news!
Keep up the good job and I’m looking forward for the playlist update 🙂
By the way I found some very interesting songs available and I’m sure my visitors will enjoy them as well.

Of course many thanks to WordPress too, for bringing us always the best out of the web!